Where did you first come across Cashel Blue Cheese? Was it in a blue cheese dressing at Gallagher’s Boxty House in Temple Bar or as part of a salad at Limerick’s Curragower Bar? On a cheeseboard at Neven Maguire’s MacNean House or Dillons Restaurant in Timoleague? Perhaps it was a vital component in an Oxmantown sandwich? There’s one thing that’s guaranteed: you’ve definitely come across this Irish farmhouse cheese on a menu, a recipe book or even in your own kitchen.
Now more than forty years old, Ireland’s first native blue cheese, Cashel Blue is remarkably democratic, sitting as happily on supermarket shelves as it does on international cheese shop counters. It’s all the more remarkable when you realise that this superb cheese is still made by hand on Jane and Louis Grubb’s 200-acre Beechmount Farm near Fethard in the lush Tipperary countryside.
Spurred on by milk quotas imposed by the European Union in the 1980s, Irish dairy farmers started to look at cheese production as a way of using excess milk. Those were very early days for the farmhouse cheesemaking industry. Only a few years earlier, Veronica Steele started making Milleens on the Beara Peninsula in West Cork, re-establishing a lost tradition and passing that knowledge on to people like Giana Ferguson of Gubbeen and Durrus’s Jeffa Gill. Up to that time, Irish cheesemaking was, according to Teagasc, “exclusively confined to large-scale factory production,” with cheddar (predominantly red, for some bizarre reason) and processed cheeses like Galtee and Calvita dominating the market.
With other farmers like the Grubbs also turning their hand to cheesemaking, by 1983 there were enough people involved for the National Dairy Council to facilitate the foundation of Cáis, the Irish Farmhouse Cheese-Makers Association. This professional and educational group is still in operation today, as are many of its earliest members.
At that time, Jane Grubb was using milk from the family farm to try her hand at cheesemaking. The road to an iconic Irish food is paved with experimentation, and she worked her way through a variety of cheeses until hitting on Cashel Blue in 1984. Batches were small. Jane only made eight wheels at a time using an 80-litre copper brewer’s vat which had been pressed into cheesemaking service. It wasn’t the only piece of equipment that was repurposed. At the time, Irish cheesemakers commonly used lengths of the largest water pipes available from their local co-ops instead of cheese moulds: as a result, a whole wheel of Cashel Blue is still only 1.5kg. Innovation was key – at the start, knitting needles were used to pierce the cheese and allow air to circulate so that the blue could develop during maturation. Jane quickly commissioned a bespoke hand-powered tool to help her; a conveyor belt now moves the cheese past a piercing machine to do the same job.
Cashel Blue was only one year in production when Neal’s Yard Dairy came calling. They were the first to import it into the UK, starting a relationship that has continued ever since. The Tipperary cheese has always been an export success and is available throughout Britain, the rest of Europe and in America, where it is sold as Kerrygold Cashel Blue. Trump’s threatened tariffs may cause some issues in the short term, but the Grubbs have always taken a long-term view, weathering many national and international economic issues over the last 40 plus years. It helps that the business is still under family management. Sarah – Jane and Louis’ daughter – joined Cashel Farmhouse Cheesemakers in 2003 with her Italian husband Sergio Furno, bringing new energy, ideas and plans for the future.
No food business is truly sustainable unless there is a consistently good product at the heart of it. Cashel Blue Cheese always delivers, and it has always had its champions amongst chefs and food writers. In the 1980s, when Myrtle Allen of Ballymaloe ran La Ferme Irlandaise – her Irish restaurant in Paris – she would bring wheels of the cheese over in her suitcase. It was described by Suzanne Hamlin in the New York Times in 1998 as “both voluptuous and sharp…Cashel Blue tastes like Stilton mixed with butter” and that still stands. It’s a well-balanced cheese, soft and creamy with a piquant spicing of blue, the kind of cheese that’s at home on your Sunday night cheeseboard or spread on some toasted walnut date bread as it is in a creamy pasta and broccoli bake.
Our Irish farmhouse cheese-loving hearts always swell with pride to see Cashel Blue Cheese featuring, as it so often does, in Irish and international cookbooks. In the early 90s, Darina Allen introduced it to the audience of her Simply Delicious series as a topping on a winter celery soup, Bernadette O’Shea of Sligo’s legendary Truffles restaurant added it to a Black and Blue pizza with olives in her 1997 book Pizza Defined and, as we moved into the 00s, Denis Cotter used it in portobello mushrooms for his Paradiso Seasons. It was a delight to see Cashel Blue incorporated into Irish Blue Biscuits in Nigella Lawson’s How to Be a Domestic Goddess and making salad appearances in both Tamasin Day Lewis’ Simply the Best and Diana Henry’s first cookbook: Roast Figs, Sugar Snow. Never underestimate the power of name checking this cheese on a menu or in a recipe: it’s always been a valuable way of introducing more people to it.
As our first native Irish blue cheese, Cashel Blue has played a distinctive part in the Irish farmhouse cheese revival, which has been a hard-won success story across the island, bringing employment and new skills into rural areas. Rather than treating milk, an essential primary product, as an anonymous commodity to be sent to the creamery, cheesemaking stakes a claim of place, of terroir, for that particular milk on that particular farm, made by those particular people. By showcasing unhomogenised whole milk from local grass-fed Friesian cattle, Cashel Blue put the Grubb family and Tipperary firmly on the Irish farmhouse cheesemaking map. That legacy was recently acknowledged by an Irish Food Writers’ Guild Lifetime Achievement Award for Jane and Louis Grubb. Long may it, and the many other individual, idiosyncratic, inventive Irish farmhouse cheeses, continue.
